


Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live

by SplinterCell



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, HYDRA Husbands, Little bit of body horror, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but nothing explicit, valentine's day fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 09:09:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13678635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplinterCell/pseuds/SplinterCell
Summary: Tony takes it all in with one glance and considers his options. “Is this why you-?” he asks. “I’m an engineer, not a doctor.”“Then isn’t it a good thing he doesn’t need a doctor?” comes the immediate reply before Tony finds himself shoved forwards.





	Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live

**Author's Note:**

> An odd little thing that popped into my head last year in response to a tumblr prompt.

Tony was busy; that’s the thing.

It had all happened so fast: one minute SHIELD was the largest, most powerful, and most well-funded intelligence and security agency in the world, and the next its headquarters was collapsing in on itself while helicarriers exploded in the DC sky.

Nobody had known what these developments heralded - Tony included. Not that he was sad to see SHIELD go, but nature abhors a vacuum, and who knew other players were keen to step into the space they had left? So Tony did what he always did when an adversary or rival faltered - snatch up their key personnel before they disappeared or died. The people with a vision, and the single-minded ruthlessness to bend the world to their will and make that vision a reality. People like the late-and-somewhat-lamented Nicholas Fury, and Phil Coulson.

Or Maria Hill.

So he was _busy_. Too busy to take breaks, or sleep, or eat anything more substantial than a bagel. Too busy to pay as much attention to things as he should have. A pretty new face amongst the executive assistants (“ _It’s a pleasure to work for you, Mr Stark._ ”). His usual driver coming down with flu (“ _I don’t know where it came from, sir. Just hit me last night. Right outta nowhere._ ”). A different company valeting his car (“ _Fully booked I’m afraid, sir. But they recommended I contact these guys instead, and they come very highly regarded._ ”). His coffee tasting a little too sharp and bitter (“ _I’m sorry, Mr Stark. I’ve never seen a coffee maker like that before. Are you sure you don’t just want me to make you another one?_ ”).

Little things of little consequence by themselves. But oh, what an elegant and simple trap they made when put together.

\- - -

Consciousness returns like a swimmer struggling to fight their way out of an undertow.

Tony is lying on cold, hard, wet concrete with the smell of oil and grease thick in his nostrils, his wrists and ankles tied together, and an idle voice in the back of his mind reminding him that this is yet _another_ $3,000 suit ruined beyond repair.

His eyes are gummy, the eyelashes pulling when he blinks. A weak fluorescent tube flickers overheard, doing little to penetrate the gloom. It’s too dark for him to make out much detail as he looks around, but the curved concrete walls suggest a bunker. A bunker that’s filled with stuff, Tony realises as his eyes adjust.

Workbenches sit against every wall; some little more than a plank of wood balanced on top of crates and boxes, every surface covered in scrap metal and electronics. Every conceivable type of tech is somewhere in the room; military-grade hardware tossed on top of household appliances and personal electronics, their innards torn out and spilling down onto the floors.

Tony tries to make sense of the chaos surrounding him, because there _is_ a pattern in this mess, some sort of order that he just can’t quite figure out—

He starts when a figure steps out from between the shadows.

It stops in front of him, little more than a darker shadow against the gloom. “Back with us, Mr Stark?” it says, and the voice is male, rough and hoarse, the words stilted.

Audio distortion, Tony guesses. Cheap theatre.

“They’ll find me,” he manages to say, around a tongue that is several sizes too large for his mouth. “They’ll already be looking for me.” It’s not an attempt at bravado, just a fact. He and Steve have their disagreements, but they’re a team. The Avengers will come for him, Tony knows they will.

The armour creaks when the figure squats, and the flickering light illuminates a white skull painted across a mask with crude slashes. “I think that depends on them knowing you are missing, don’t you?” he says, and now Tony knows for certain that the other car he glimpsed right before the world went black -his _real car_ \- wasn’t empty after all.

He ought to have junked that LMD years ago.

There’s a click, and Tony feels more than sees the wicked-looking blade an inch from his face. The figure moves, too quickly for him to do little more than cringe backwards on reflex, but the pain Tony expects never comes. Instead, the tightness around his wrists and ankles disappears as the ties fall away.

The man stands, blade disappearing with a metallic scrape, and hauls Tony up by his arm. “Come,” he orders, pushing Tony forwards towards a door he hadn’t noticed. A door, he realises with dawning horror, emblazoned with a seal of a grinning skull surrounded by tentacles.

Behind that door the light is so bright it feels like someone has stabbed knives into Tony’s skull. This room is a far cry from the one he woke up in. Plain, white tiles line the walls and floor, and reflect the light from rows of fluorescent strip lighting. Top-of-the-line medical equipment, most of which he can’t name, line the walls, and in the centre of the room, a man lies on an operating table.

Tony takes it all in with one glance and considers his options. “Is this why you-?” he asks. “I’m an engineer, not a doctor.”

“Then isn’t it a good thing he doesn’t need a doctor?” comes the immediate reply before Tony finds himself shoved forwards.

He stumbles, catching himself on the edge of the table, and up close he realises that his initial assessment was incorrect. What’s on the table is something that used to _look_ like a man before being burned and crushed almost beyond recognition.

A patchwork mesh of skin grafts obscures one side of his face from his cheek down onto his neck, but it’s his eyes that catch Tony’s attention; both are open, but where the one on the right-hand side is a golden hazel, the other is a bright and startling green.

Other grafts, some darker and others lighter than the man’s own olive skin, but all discoloured and in the final stages of rejection, cover wounds across his chest, abdomen and one arm. The other ends in a raw stump at the elbow. The skin has been peeled back from the joint, but where there should be white bone, Tony instead sees the dull gleam of metal, and now he knows what he’s looking for it’s impossible to miss the same grey shadow underneath the grafts covering the deeper wounds.

Not just living tissue grafted over a metal endoskeleton. Not even close. Hydra hadn’t recruited to their organisation, he realises with a sick jolt. They’d _built_.

Tony looks up to find the figure staring back at him. “What is he?” he asks, and the mask tilts as though its wearer is contemplating the question.

“Important to me,” he states at length, and that isn’t the answer Tony was expecting. “I want you to fix him.”

It takes a moment to find his voice. “I can’t,” Tony says, mindful that it is never a good idea to tell your kidnapper you can’t do what they kidnapped you to do. “I’ve never seen something like this before.”

The figure stares at him for a moment before his hand moves over the table. Tony flinches as a screw pings off the arc reactor under his shirt and drops to the floor. “No, you don’t understand,” he argues, even as a voice at the back of his mind that sounds like Rhodey tells him to shut his goddamn mouth. “This isn’t the same. You can’t fix something like this with- with-” he gestures at the door leading back to the storeroom “- _junk_ , okay? You can’t.”

One gauntleted hand settles over the man-machine’s forehead. “Tony Stark built an arc reactor in a cave with a box of scraps,” the figure says. His fingers gently push strands of dark hair away from the pallid skin. He doesn’t look up when he says, “You _will_ fix him.” 

Now it sounds a lot less like a statement of an inevitable outcome and much more like a threat. 

“It’s not- look, it’s _not_ the same.” LMDs are one thing; they look human, and they feel human, and if you don’t know better, you’ll think they are human. But they’re still just machines; fancy programming housed in a high-end chassis. This, though? This skirts the boundary between artificial and organic in a way Tony cannot comprehend. “Maybe I could rebuild him,” he mutters, more to himself than to his new friend. “If I had the parts, if I knew how it’s all supposed to work. But I don’t.”

There is another metallic scrape, suddenly and terrifyingly loud in the silence. Tony’s head jerks up, but instead of finding the knife at his throat again, he sees the figure twisting his own arm, and then the gauntlet falls onto the floor with a dull thud. He reaches over to detach the other gauntlet, but when he pulls it off Tony realises that he’s wearing a prosthesis in place of his left arm.

Then the mask comes off, revealing a handsome, dark-haired man Tony has never seen before in his life. “Yes, you do,” he says slowly. Without the mask his voice is warm, generic Midwestern farmhand. He looks down at the man-machine again, his mouth curling into a small smile.

Tony can’t tear his gaze away from the open, empty eye-socket where his left eye ought to be.

**Author's Note:**

> What's more romantic than sacrificing yourself to rebuild the one you love? Nothing, that's what!  
> Happy Valentine's Day y'all :)


End file.
